Earlier today Troy, our Base Manager and field support person here at Scott Base in Antarctica, did a stock take and de-cluttered a space nobody seems to have looked at for quite a while. Out came a box full of extreme weather gloves accumulated probably since the early days of Scott Base in the late1950s. A glove history reaching back a few decades. Looking at them in detail, I was struck by the fact that what we are currently wearing has hardly changed over the years.

Colour and style may have adapted to fashion sense, but the principle of inner and outer shells, long sleeves with two tie strings and the all important nose wiper(the fluffy bit), has not changed at all.

Going back further it is obvious that the gloves of the early explorers are a bit more rugged, but I am sure that there is at least one feature that has not changed at all even since then: the impossibility to do any meaningful task with them apart from just holding on to something.